Earvolution
July 18, 2006
by Jim McCoy
Mark Karan has stood in the lead guitar role for Ratdog since 1998. Despite the hotel phone disconnecting us three times, Mark was a pleasant interview throughout and spoke to earvolution.com about a variety of musical topics ranging from seeing the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park, Two-Rock amplifiers and the theme song for Friends:
JM: If my research is correct, I note that Tuesday's show in Philadelphia was your 500th show with Ratdog.
MK: I had no idea about that until yesterday when I got an e-mail from somebody congratulating me. But, yeah, apparently it was. [laughs]
JM: How do you feel about reaching that milestone?
MK: [pauses] I don't know if I have a lot of feelings about it. It definitely puts a lot of things into perspective. There's a definite history with the band now, and that shows up with the way the band plays together, myself included. We've had the same combination of guys for a while now and I think, if anything, that's why the band is working so well.
JM: I noticed on Tuesday a lot of smiles back and forth between the guys. You actually look like you're having a good time up there while you're playing.
MK: God forbid, right? [laughs] Yeah, we are. And that's the whole idea. Ratdog is definitely - well, most of the bands in the jam band scene - are not the kind of bands that are trying to be rock stars and make the big ducats. Most of the people that are doing all of this stuff are here because we want to be - because we love to do it on some level.
JM: When did you first realize that you could make a living playing music?
MK: Umm...when I was about 44 and joined The Other Ones? [laughs]
JM: What was that like? Was that the first time that you had played in large arenas night after night?
MK: For an extended period of time, yeah. I did a tour with Paul Carrack back in the late 80's and that was, for lack of a better term, the first 'real' tour that I was ever involved with. I’d done some traveling in a van with younger bands in my younger days. Carrack was the first real tour I did and then I toured on and off with Dave Mason for about a year, but that was smaller venues and we did a little bit of overseas stuff. So, yeah, The Other Ones was really my first steady thing that was bigger.
JM: What was it like getting on stage for the first time and looking out to see 20,000 people in the audience?
MK: That's where being 44 made a big difference. It wasn't that weird for me. It was definitely a rush. No question about that. But I had already been playing music professionally for about 25 years. Bob [Weir] to this day, I think, still gets butterflies. I'm not one of those. I feel pretty comfortable in my own skin on stage.
JM: So, for you, it was part of a natural progression.
MK: Yeah, exactly. It was weird, there's no question about it. But this coming year I'll be 52, so my introduction to the Grateful Dead was as an 11 year-old kid running around Haight-Ashbury with my other 11 and 12 year-old friends listening to the Dead play in [Golden Gate] Park and going to the free shows at the Fillmore on Sunday afternoons...
JM: Was there any pressure stepping into the lead guitar role with Bob Weir after Garcia had occupied that same role for so long?
MK: That's a multi-faceted question. In one sense, no. Not because I was cocky and sure of myself or anything, but I had been playing for long enough and had enough love of the music and enough background in this music that it's a pretty natural fit for me. It took me a few years to get back into the whole improv approach to playing after playing more commercial-oriented music for a long time. The guys made me feel pretty comfortable. In that respect, it was great. But it was a big responsibility, and certainly I was always extremely uncomfortable for the first couple of years in that every interview that I did always had 'The Question:' How does it feel to fill those shoes? The pat answer became, "I'm not. No one can."
JM: I think a lot of people recognize that.
MK: Yeah, exactly.
JM: But it doesn't seem like Ratdog is trying to be a Grateful Dead cover band, in a sense. Ratdog is just trying to keep the music going and trying to do some of your own things at the same time.
MK: Basically, yeah. It's the ongoing process, for better or for worse, of any artist, musical or otherwise. Look at McCartney. After The Beatles, he didn't just fade away. He put Wings together, and when that didn't happen anymore he did world solo tours. People want to make music and reference their history in the process. There's no reason that McCartney shouldn't do "She Loves You," and there's no reason that Bobby shouldn't do Grateful Dead material.
JM: You had talked about doing some more commercial music. I'm sure that this is a tired question, but were you involved in writing and playing the theme to Friends?
MK: No, no, no.
JM: But that was the Rembrandts...
MK: I did play with that band. I believe that the Friends theme was on their fourth album. I had been a fan, actually. They had been a very cool, sort-of Beatles meets Everly Brothers slightly-edged pop band with great vocals and really cool, hooky melodies that I had enjoyed for quite a while. Around the fourth album, they got invited to do the Friends theme more or less anonymously for a large sum of money. They did that, and it came back to bite 'em in the ass. When the show started, all of these people liked the song and began calling up their local DJs and requesting it. And it didn't exist anywhere, so all of these DJs were taping it off the TV. So the record label made the Rembrandts go in the studio, cut a song that they hadn't even written and slap it on to their fourth album. For the first few months they made several million dollars. It was very kind to them financially. But the backlash - everybody hating that song after a while, hearing it everyday, 50,000 times a day - basically canned their career and one of the two of them split. Enter me.
JM: It's unfortunate that something like that happens after a band has some success.
MK: What is really unfortunate is the level of judgment. Frankly, if I have one real beef with the Grateful Dead community - or, the Deadhead community - it's the fact that when you step outside the immediate realm of the Grateful Dead, there's really small-minded people out there. They might say, "I don't like country." But what about 'Mama Tried,' you know? [laughs] What about 'Big Railroad Blues'? You're listening to country every time you put on a Grateful Dead record.
JM: That's sure to generate some discussion on DeadNetCentral.
MK: Yeah.
JM: How did you fall into the Grateful Dead scene in the first place?
MK: That was another odd one. I grew up in the Bay Area listening to these guys pretty early in their days, and I hadn't even listened to the Grateful Dead since probably the late 70's. I had been a huge fan initially and then moved onto other kinds of music that was more pertinent to what I was up to. When I was in L.A., I had met a drummer named John Molo. We did a couple of sessions together and the occasional blues gig. Whatever was happening, we kept bumping into each other and really enjoyed working together.
JM: And he was Bruce Hornsby's longtime drummer?
MK: That's right.
JM: And is that how you eventually fell into The Other Ones?
MK: When [The Other Ones's] first drummer - the more jazzier guy - didn't work out as well as they had hoped, they just kinda started asking around. They had been in the Grateful Dead for so long that they really didn't meet a lot of guys that played with a variety of bands, that type of musician.
JM: I guess when a band is that big, getting access to musicians like the Grateful Dead...
MK: Yeah, it's a pretty insular type of existence. I know that they got at least three of the names of people that they listened to from Molo. And one of them was mine.
JM: What would say that your 3 top songs are to play on the road right now?
MK: [pauses] That's a tough one, really, because there’s so many approaches to songs within the stuff that we do. Some of them are very, very song-oriented, more structure based, well written, singable songs with great stories to tell and I love playing those. I love playing "Wharf Rat" or "Loser" or the kind of stuff along those lines that's melodic. I also like getting pretty out there. You can take "Playing in the Band" or "Dark Star" or "Birdsong" or one of those kinds of songs through a lot of different areas musically. That handful and throw in "The Other One" - I might be able to narrow it to something like that but it's more like what's going on night to night rather than song to song.
JM: I guess with such a large catalog of great material...
MK: It's also getting reinvented night to night. It wholly depends on where everybody in the band's heads and hearts are at, it depends on where everybody in the audience's heads and hearts are at, what kind of stew gets cooked up with everybody being thrown in the same pot that night.
JM: As far as equipment goes, you seem to be kind of a purist in that you use a Telecaster, the Les Paul, Paul Reed Smith. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of effects in your sound.
MK: I've actually got lots of effects and a pretty complicated amp rig. The main reason is not to jump around doing a bunch of gimmicky stuff, but to have real solid analog versus digital versions of classic guitar sounds and guitar approaches to use in my palette. I use pretty traditional guitars. I'm using newer amps, but a lot of amps that I'm using are based on old circuits that were developed in the 50's and 60’s.
JM: What kind of amplifiers are you using right now?
MK: Primarily, I'm using an amp from a company called 65 Corp and it's called the London. It’s based on a sort of combination of a Vox and a Marshall. The other head- I’ve switched between two - is from a company out in California called Two-Rock that Steve Kimock turned me on to. It's not a clone or a knock-off, but it's based on the much talked about Dumble amplifiers. I've got 7 or 8 effects pedals and things, but I've got everything in selectable loops so that if I'm not actually using it it's not in the circuit path at all. Like you stated earlier, I'm kind of a purist.
JM: Do you use much in the way of distortion?
MK: Actually, a fair amount. Not necessarily applied the way one would hear it more regularly in a pop or heavier rock context, but absolutely. Distortion sort of winds up - to me, anyway - giving a lot of character to a guitar tone.
JM: Are you mostly self-taught?
MK: Predominately, yes.
JM: When did you start playing?
MK: I was probably about 9 when a took a beaten-up folk guitar...
JM: Now for the big question: Where does Mark Karan go from here?
MK: Man, I don't even know. I think that one of the things about this whole experience is that I've stopped trying to predict that kind of thing. If somebody had asked me 10 years ago what I'd be up to today - considering that I started doing all this stuff 8 years ago - [laughs]
JM: Do you do any odd jobs back in the day like most musicians tend to do?
MK: I spent most of my life doing a combination of multiple things. I did a lot of nights in dumpy blues/rock 'n roll bars for fifty bucks that were really, really fun for no money; I've been in a lot of bands that were, as they say, "going for the brass ring," trying to get their own little record deal for their own thing. Again, a lot of fun, a lot of work, no money. [laughs]
JM: Do you think a young musician - 18, 20 years old - can still go out to San Francisco today and do things like you did with the current housing prices?
MK: That's really a tough question. Yes, I think it can be done. Do I think it's even remotely easy and would I recommend it? No. I think it can be done but the criteria for what you need to survive has to fit. I spent a lot of years doing couch surfing, I lived in my truck for nearly five years...
JM: Wow.
MK: I always had roommates well into my 30's. When you look at stuff like that, it's really kind of comes down to what you need in life. If what you want is to - relatively early - get into a comfortable apartment, get yourself a sweet babe and maybe start making babies, music is probably not for you. [laughs]
